Labour has published the first football-style league tables to rank hospitals in England from best to worst since the early 2000s, despite warnings it would not help patients choose where to seek care.
Moorfields specialist eye hospital in London tops the table, with the Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, bottom.
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, said the move would help banish the “postcode lottery” in the speed and quality of treatment. But health experts cautioned that it was impossible to capture correctly whether any hospital was “good” or “bad” and that the results could prompt patients to avoid seeking help at lower-rated ones.
Streeting said: “We must be honest about the state of the NHS to fix it. Patients and taxpayers have to know how their local NHS services are doing compared to the rest of the country.”
League table of NHS trusts
The league tables cover all 205 NHS trusts in England, which provide acute, mental health, community-based or ambulance care. The tables will be updated every three months and are based on 30 different metrics, including how long patients wait for A&E care and planned treatment, the trust’s financial position and patients’ direct experiences.
The Department of Health and Social Care said that publication marked “the start of a new era of transparency and accountability in the NHS, with league tables delivering on the government’s promise to drive up standards, tackle variation in care and ensure people get the high-quality service they rightly expect”.
High-performing trusts will be given greater freedom from NHS England and Whitehall control, while poorer performers will receive “enhanced support” to help them improve.
Ministers are reviving the league tables, which were introduced as “star ratings” in 2000 under Tony Blair’s government, to try to reverse a slump in public satisfaction with the NHS. The coalition government scrapped those ratings in 2010.
“This isn’t naming and shaming,” a Department of Health official insisted. “It’s about identifying areas of challenge so we can help trusts make their way up the table.”
Thea Stein, the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust thinktank, said the fact that trusts’ finances were used to judge them meant that the league tables would be “of limited use for patients trying to choose the best hospital for their care”.
She added: “The scheme also risks discouraging people from getting treatment from poorly performing trusts or staff from working for them.”
Small trusts, and those in remote areas, some of which have struggled to provide high-quality care, could be badly affected, Stein said.
Danielle Jefferies, an analyst at the King’s Fund thinktank, said in a blog post: “Whether these league tables will be helpful to the public is questionable, because hospital performance is not as simple as good or bad.”
A hospital might have short A&E waiting times but not give patients access to non-urgent care within the 18-week target or a cancer diagnosis within 28 days, she said. Jefferies added that a single overall rating for a trust could not properly convey the range of performance when one trust ran a number of hospitals, such as the 10 operated by the Manchester University trust.
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Under Streeting’s plan, all 205 trusts have been put into one of four “segments” and then given an overall score, based on the 30 metrics. A lower score denotes a higher-performing trust.
The best performers were trusts that provided specialist care, such as first-placed Moorfields, the Royal national orthopaedic hospital in outer London (second), Christie cancer hospital in Manchester (third) and Liverpool heart and chest hospital (fourth).
Northumbria, ranked ninth, was the best-performing non-specialist acute hospital, followed by University College London.
Papers for a Moorfields board meeting in July show that it was the 10th best performer in England for patients waiting 18 weeks for elective care, third for providing diagnostic tests within six weeks and second for four-hour A&E performance.
Meanwhile, Labour politicians were warned on Tuesday that they could lose the next election to Reform UK unless they transform health and local NHS services in England’s poorest areas.
The warning was contained in research for the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, chaired by Labour grandee Hilary Armstrong.
Ministers need to ensure that the network of promised “neighbourhood health centres”, offering a range of NHS services, opens in deprived areas as soon as possible, the report said, adding: “Getting this right could be the difference in the government being re-elected or returning to opposition.”
